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Dogs and Demons :: Керр Алекс
Страница: 224 из 270However, in Japan the situation is different in that such freedoms have always been allowed so long as people toe the line with regard to their families, work, social hierarchies, and so on. In other words, sex and fashion are delinked from politics. This was true even in the seventeenth century, when Jesuit missionaries fresh from imperial Beijing, where most people dressed in drab blue or black, arrived in Japan to find a colorful «floating world» of brilliantly dyed silks, incredible towering hairstyles, and long flowing sleeves. Compared to that in China, life in Japan looked like wild abandon, and yet at the time Japan was one of the most tightly controlled societies on earth.
Ian Buruma quotes an essay by movie director Oshima Nagisa (known for the film In the Realm of the Senses) in which he describes a meeting with a conservative politician. The politician says mores have the power to change society, but the director thinks otherwise. «Here Oshima puts his finger on the sorest point of Japanese politics-'it is not, as the LDP Dietman said, that mores have more power to change society than politics; rather the forces unable to change society through politics shift to manners and mores.' » One could argue that the extreme fashions of the youth represent precisely that: a veiled protest against the established order. Whether it signifies real change in the society is still an open question.
In any case, the youth fashion does underscore the extreme groupism of the young in Japan. Seventeen-year-old girls set the trend. «It's not how much they spend,» says Ogino Yoshiyuki, editor of a teen magazine, «it's that they all buy the same things. So if someone has a $10 product, they can sell lots of them.» Tim Larimer writes: «If an item is hot, like pagers – they're called pocket bells in Japan – a manufacturer can get almost 100% market penetration and fast. 'If it is really powerful, it can take less than a week,' says Ogino. Once 5% of the teen girl population takes a liking to something, he says, 60% will join the bandwagon within a month. A few weeks later, everybody will be on board. The hard part is predicting what the famously fickle teenage girls will next anoint as kawaii!' »
There is no better mirror of a nation's life than its movies, and Japan's cinema perfectly reflects the nation's modern cultural malaise, for it is a tale of nearly unbroken decline over three decades. Once boasting masters such as Kurosawa Akira and Ozu Yasujiro, Japan has recently produced only a few films of moderate world success.
Ian Buruma quotes an essay by movie director Oshima Nagisa (known for the film In the Realm of the Senses) in which he describes a meeting with a conservative politician. The politician says mores have the power to change society, but the director thinks otherwise. «Here Oshima puts his finger on the sorest point of Japanese politics-'it is not, as the LDP Dietman said, that mores have more power to change society than politics; rather the forces unable to change society through politics shift to manners and mores.' » One could argue that the extreme fashions of the youth represent precisely that: a veiled protest against the established order. Whether it signifies real change in the society is still an open question.
In any case, the youth fashion does underscore the extreme groupism of the young in Japan. Seventeen-year-old girls set the trend. «It's not how much they spend,» says Ogino Yoshiyuki, editor of a teen magazine, «it's that they all buy the same things. So if someone has a $10 product, they can sell lots of them.» Tim Larimer writes: «If an item is hot, like pagers – they're called pocket bells in Japan – a manufacturer can get almost 100% market penetration and fast. 'If it is really powerful, it can take less than a week,' says Ogino. Once 5% of the teen girl population takes a liking to something, he says, 60% will join the bandwagon within a month. A few weeks later, everybody will be on board. The hard part is predicting what the famously fickle teenage girls will next anoint as kawaii!' »
There is no better mirror of a nation's life than its movies, and Japan's cinema perfectly reflects the nation's modern cultural malaise, for it is a tale of nearly unbroken decline over three decades. Once boasting masters such as Kurosawa Akira and Ozu Yasujiro, Japan has recently produced only a few films of moderate world success.